Saturday, June 6, 2009

How good is this book? Just follow this link over to Amazon.com and buy yourself a copy. Right now. It's that good.(Alternatively, go to your local library and politely request that they acquire a copy for their Philosophy section.)If a great book is one that shows you something more and different every time you read it, that changes with every reading because every reading changes you, then Inwardness and Existence is a great book. It's also a good book, the best kind in fact, the kind you can periodically re-read for the rest of your life. What makes it so special, sets it above most other books written by American academics in the last 30 years? It's a philosophically rigorous and at times mind-bogglingly ambitious book about the structure and construction of the self. While most academic writing on this subject today begins and ends with Foucault or Lacan and their followers, Davis's book begins with Hegel and doesn't really end. The book is circular, like a philosophical Finnegans Wake. It would probably be greatly illuminating to read Inwardness and Existence straight through and then turn immediately back to the first page and begin again, with the foreknowledge constituted by the first reading still fresh in one's mind.Davis's book is 20 years old this year, and it's time for it to become more widely known in America and the rest of the world. (It appears to be slightly better known in Britain, where it has influenced the thinking of Britain's leading theologian, Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury.) This book and Davis's work generally should be at least as well-known as the works of Derrida, a thinker Davis surpasses and contains. One of the many high points of I&E (for me, anyway) is the section in which Davis compellingly argues that Deconstruction is a prematurely arrested moment of a dialectical movement that issues in Hegelian unhappy (or tragic) consciousness. Furthermore, Davis presents this demonstration not with a view to defending the battered ruins of traditional humanism but with the intention of radically destabilizing both humanism and deconstruction by means of a vast and Romantically ambitious synthesis of central ideas from the works of the four thinkers listed in the subtitle. Even more impressively, Davis doesn't simply lift useful ideas from Hegel, Freud, Marx and Heidegger; he reads each of them against themselves (as traditionally interpreted) to offer interesting and exciting new understandings of Hegelian self-consciousness, Existentialist freedom, Marxist subjectivity and Freudian psychoanalysis. (I did call it mind-bogglingly ambitious, didn't I?) And Davis's extended examinations of these schools of thought are so rich in insight, so powerful and compelling in their discussions of lived experience and of the meanings we give to life, that the book might as well have been subtitled "Subjectivity in/and Consciousness, Death, Culture, and Sex." (The book would probably have sold more copies with this subtitle.)Both nouns in the title are crucial to understanding this book and Davis's work as a whole, but I want to focus on the second and think about Inwardness and Existence as a major contribution to Existentialism, probably the most important contribution yet made by an American thinker. This book takes Existentialism beyond Sartre, as he is popularly understood, by arguing that Sartrean freedom is not an a priori but must be achieved by a rigorous and extremely difficult process of rooting out the enormous intrusions of the Other upon the Self, the networks of internalized conflicts and ideologies that constitute most of who and what we are. This process of rooting out--called anti-bildung here and elaborated upon in Davis's later works Deracination and Death's Dream Kingdom--is the necessary preliminary to any of the authentic acts by which the Sartrean subject constructs his self, and it is such difficult work that few human beings ever begin it.I know what you're thinking: If this book is so great, why haven't I heard of it?Easy answer: You have heard of it now.

1 comment:

You are a reading machine! I want to know the secret behind the ability to read 20 books in 2 weeks, including Gravity's Rainbow, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Faust, parts 1 AND 2!!! I love the books you choose. Thanks for an excellent site, and incredible energy. Please check out my blog, where I manage about 2 or 3 book reviews a month ... www.blogundine.blogspot.com ... would love to know what you think. Best wishes - and remember to eat! _ Sally

ABOUT THE TITLE

The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth

AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes

CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano

DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair

FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot

L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain

SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger

THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James

THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

Ovid

Dante

Shakespeare

John Donne

John Milton

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Charles Baudelaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

W. B. Yeats

Rainer Maria Rilke

T. S. Eliot

Guillaume Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Hart Crane

Wallace Stevens

W. H. Auden

Dylan Thomas

Allen Ginsberg

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Anne Sexton

Pablo Neruda

Paul Celan

Seamus Heaney

John Ashbery

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook

A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag

BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr

EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass

FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes

IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis

LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair

MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt

REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann